[textbook]Traversing the Ethical Minefield Problems, Law, and Professional Responsibility by Susan R. Martyn (z-lib.org)(1) (1)

but all lawyers, in terms of their commitment to the enterprise. Lawyers went from being
professionals evaluated on their excellence to being full time equivalent timekeepers
(“FTE’s”) evaluated on the basis of numbers. . . .
The next step in the march of the billable hour was the adoption by firms of billable
hour goals — just like those describing so many affirmative action initiatives. And not,
heaven forefend, to be confused with billable hour quotas or requirements. Just a gentle
nudge directed at all lawyers that the firm had expectations. But it was not long before
these goals became much more than that. Firms told their lawyers, especially the associates,
that the firms would provide bonuses to those lawyers whose billable hour production
exceeded certain thresholds, perhaps $25,000 for 2,000 hours, another $10,000 for the
next 200 and so on, bonuses cascading without limit. . . .
The Conflict — Compounded
Though hourly billing is universally employed, and has many characteristics that
recommend it, hourly billing certainly has one huge ethical deficit. The client has a very
real interest in limiting the client’s legal fees; the lawyers get rewarded, at least in the short
run, for an increased number of hours. In short, hourly billing is a great incentive for the
lawyer to undertake more tasks and to complete them more slowly, perhaps contrary to the
interests of the client.
The imposition of specific goals, quotas or requirements for billable hours by law firms
only heightens this conflict and, as the fictional disclosure in the preface to this article
makes clear, they are hard to justify as serving any legitimate client interest. Simply ask
yourself how you would feel if your dentist made that disclosure to you before you
underwent a painful root canal. While the pain the young dentist might be inclined to
prolong to add to her hour total may be more stinging than any a lawyer can inflict, any
incentive to inflict pain on clients by delaying resolution of their matters or increasing their
fees is something our profession should stamp out, not encourage.
Distortions
Think about the distortions that are introduced by this system. The affected lawyers are
always asking two questions: What are my hours? What goal can I achieve? As the year
drags on the lawyer either falls behind the goal or realizes that yet a higher goal (and its
resulting additional bonuses) is achievable. Either way the obsession with these statistics
only grows. . . .
Think also about the likely effect of this system on the recording of time. In the brave
new world of lawyer time accounting, hours are measured in tenths (a mere six minutes),
an absurd construct that . . . has placed virtually every lawyer in America in a position in
which he or she is guilty of multiple mini-frauds every day. If one really kept track of every
hour every work day in six minute increments, that is, in fact, all one would have time to
do. . . .
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